Royalty Exchange Review 2026: Buying Music Royalties as an Alternative Asset

TL;DR: Royalty Exchange has brokered more than $200 million across 2,000-plus royalty transactions since it opened its marketplace, drawing in over 30,000 registered investors who bid on income streams from songs, films, and other IP. You can buy into a producer royalty for $10,000 or bid on a seven-figure publishing catalog, and deals close through a sealed-auction model that at least gives you a price discovery process — something the institutional side of this market spectacularly lacked. I'll walk you through how the auctions actually work, show you real closed deals (the $535,000 Drake/Megan Thee Stallion/Beyoncé catalog and the $1.25 million Tate McRae publishing sale at a 6.92x multiple), and then explain why the Hipgnosis Songs Fund and Round Hill Music Royalty Fund blowups matter to you even if you never touch a public fund.

What Royalty Exchange Actually Is

Royalty Exchange is an online marketplace where songwriters, producers, and rights holders sell their future royalty income to investors through a bidding process, and where you, as a buyer, get to underwrite a specific catalog before you commit real money. The platform has closed over 2,000 transactions and moved more than $200 million in royalty deals across a base of 30,000-plus registered investors, according to the company's own disclosures. That is a meaningful track record for a niche corner of alternative assets, but it is still a small marketplace compared to public REITs or even other fractional-ownership platforms. Keep that in mind before you assume deep liquidity exists here, because it does not.

The pitch is straightforward: music royalties throw off cash whether or not the broader market is having a good year. A song that generated $40,000 in mechanical, performance, and streaming royalties last year will likely generate something close to that this year, discounted for the natural decline curve every catalog eventually hits. You are not buying equity in an artist's career. You are buying a contractual right to collect a defined slice of income for a set term: sometimes in perpetuity, sometimes for 10 years, depending on the deal structure.

How the Auction Model Actually Works

Every listing on Royalty Exchange goes through a due diligence period before it hits public bidding. The seller submits royalty statements, usually going back three to five years, and Royalty Exchange's team (led by CEO Gary Young) verifies the income history with the performing rights organizations, publishers, or distributors actually paying out. Once a listing goes live, you can see the trailing 12-month (LTM) earnings, the historical earnings trend, and what the platform calls the "Dollar Age" of the catalog, essentially how much of its lifetime earnings potential a song has already burned through, per the platform's own Buying Music Royalties 101 guide. Bidding runs as a live, ascending auction, not a sealed-bid process. You can see competing bids in real time and decide how far you're willing to go, similar in spirit to eBay but for a decade of Spotify mechanicals instead of a used guitar. The official auction mechanics page lays out reserve prices, extension rules when bids come in near the closing bell, and buyer verification steps. There's no blanket accreditation requirement across every listing. Some deals are open to any registered buyer, though higher-value catalogs and certain deal structures do carry accreditation or minimum-experience requirements set by the seller or the platform. Entry prices for smaller producer or writer-share royalties can start around $10,000, though most contested catalogs sell for well above that once bidding heats up.

Real Deals, Real Multiples

Numbers matter more than adjectives here, so look at what has actually traded.

In one widely cited sale, a publishing catalog tied to songs performed by Drake, Megan Thee Stallion, and Beyoncé sold for $535,000 in a Royalty Exchange auction. The seller was a co-writer with a fractional share of the underlying compositions, not the headline artists themselves. That distinction matters, because "a Drake song" and "a percentage of the publishing on a Drake song" are very different assets with very different cash flow certainty. Tate McRae's "You Broke Me First" publishing rights sold for $1.25 million at a 6.92x multiple of trailing 12-month earnings, meaning the buyer paid roughly seven years of current income up front, betting the song keeps earning at or above that rate for years to come. On the smaller end, a producer royalty tied to Lana Del Rey's "Honeymoon" sold for $77,000 at a steep 9.9x multiple, and a Khalid "Location" catalog piece with a fixed 10-year term sold for $275,000 at 4.57x. That spread, from under 5x to nearly 10x, tells you the market is pricing catalogs individually based on genre durability, sync licensing potential, and how much of the song's earning life is still ahead of it, not applying one blanket formula.

Jeff's Read: Yield Now, Decay Risk Later

Here's where I put my own view on the table. The yield story on these deals looks compelling on a spreadsheet. A catalog trading at 6x LTM earnings implies something like a 16-17% unlevered cash yield in year one if the income holds flat, before you even account for any growth from sync placements, catalog reissues, or streaming rate increases. That's a real number, and it's why family offices and now retail buyers have chased this asset class since the low-interest-rate years made bond yields look pathetic. The catch is the word "if the income holds flat." Songs are not annuities. A track's streaming numbers decay from the moment the initial promotional push ends, and the decay curve is steeper for songs riding a single viral moment than for catalog staples with 20 years of consistent radio and sync licensing behind them. The catalog decay risk framework that professional buyers use models this explicitly: pay attention to whether you're buying a song still riding a viral TikTok moment (steep decay ahead) or a catalog piece that's already proven a decade of stable earnings (shallower, more predictable curve). The Tate McRae deal at 6.92x is a bet on a still-young hit continuing to perform. The Khalid deal at a lower 4.57x multiple and fixed 10-year term reads like a buyer being more conservative about how long that income really lasts. Multiple alone doesn't tell you which bet is smarter. You have to look at what's driving the earnings and how much of the song's commercial life is already spent. This is exactly the analysis I'd expect from a music royalty investing guide before you place a single bid, because the auction format rewards buyers who've done the homework and punishes buyers bidding on vibes and name recognition alone.

The Institutional Cautionary Tale: Hipgnosis and Round Hill

If you want to see what happens when this asset class gets priced badly at scale, look at the public markets, not Royalty Exchange's retail auctions. Hipgnosis Songs Fund, the London-listed vehicle that built a catalog including rights to Rihanna, Shakira, and Journey songs, ran into a valuation crisis that unwound in dramatic fashion. Its operative NAV per share fell 9.2% to $1.7392 in the first half of fiscal 2023, the fund suspended its dividend, and shareholders then voted down a continuation resolution that management needed to keep the fund running as structured, a rare and damaging rebuke, as QuotedData's coverage of the NAV collapse documented. The rejection triggered a strategic review and the eventual sale of roughly 20,000 non-core songs as the board scrambled to rebuild confidence and shore up the balance sheet. The core problem: independent valuers had been marking catalogs using assumptions about streaming growth and catalog longevity that turned out to be too optimistic, and once the market demanded a harder look, the marked NAV came down faster than anyone had priced in. Round Hill Music Royalty Fund tells a related but distinct story. Despite delivering a NAV return of roughly 35% since its 2020 IPO, the fund's shares traded at close to a 50% discount to that NAV. Investors simply didn't trust the stated valuation, even with real cash flow backing it, as QuotedData's analysis of the NAV-versus-discount gap laid out. That persistent skepticism eventually opened the door for a take-private. Concord, working with Alchemy Copyrights, made a recommended offer at US$1.15 per share that the board accepted, effectively conceding that the public market discount wasn't going away on its own. Industry press framed the deal as a net positive for how music assets get valued from here on, with Billboard's reporting on the Concord acquisition noting it gave the broader market a cleaner benchmark price after years of NAV skepticism. The lesson for you isn't "avoid music royalties." It's that even professionally managed, publicly listed catalogs with teams of independent valuers got the pricing wrong enough to blow up dividends and force fire-sale portfolio trims. If institutional buyers with more resources than you can misjudge decay curves and discount rates, you should assume your own catalog-level underwriting on a Royalty Exchange auction needs to be conservative, not optimistic. Bid like the Hipgnosis valuers were wrong, because in some cases, they were.

Who This Actually Fits

Royalty Exchange works best for you if you already understand cash-flow investing, think rental property or private credit, and want a genuinely uncorrelated income stream that doesn't move with equities or rates. It also fits investors who enjoy doing catalog-level research: pulling up a song's Spotify streaming history, checking whether it's had recent sync placements in film or TV, and sanity-checking the seller's earnings statements against public data before bidding. If you're the type who wants to set it and forget it, this isn't your platform; there is no secondary market to speak of, so if you overpay at auction or the catalog decays faster than expected, you're holding that position until the underlying royalty term runs out. It's a poor fit if you need liquidity on a defined timeline, or if your entire alternative-assets allocation is one music royalty purchase rather than one position among several uncorrelated bets: cat bonds, farmland, or private credit, for instance. Diversifying across asset classes matters here as much as diversifying across catalogs. If you're weighing where music royalties sit alongside other alternatives, our music royalty investing guide walks through allocation sizing, and it's worth comparing the risk-and-yield profile against something like catastrophe bonds, which carry a completely different risk driver (natural disasters, not streaming decay) but a similarly headline-friendly yield.

Your Next Step

Don't bid on the first catalog that has a name you recognize. Create a free Royalty Exchange account, watch three to five live auctions all the way through closing without bidding, and track how the closing multiple compares to the LTM earnings and Dollar Age data the platform discloses. Once you've seen how genre, term length, and earnings trend actually move the final price, run the same decay-curve questions on a real listing that you'd apply to any cash-flowing asset: how much of this income depends on the artist staying relevant versus the catalog's proven history, and what's your walk-away multiple if bidding gets emotional. The music market itself is in a genuine up-cycle. Global recorded music revenue hit $31.7 billion in 2025, its eleventh straight year of growth according to IFPI's data cited in Royalty Exchange's own materials, but a rising tide doesn't protect you from paying too much for one specific catalog in one specific auction.

Disclosure: [Placeholder — insert Jeff Barnes/AIN standard alternative-investments disclosure and any affiliate relationship with Royalty Exchange here before publication.]

Author Disclosure: Jeff Barnes, MBA has no personal position in any company, fund, or platform named in this article. Angel Investors Network has no current commercial relationship with any party mentioned. AIN provides marketing and education services, not investment advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results. All investments involve risk, including loss of principal.